A Welsh blogger asked her Amazon Echo to pronounce the longest place name in Europe - prompting the gadget to come back with an incomprehensible reply. Ms Angharad, who writes about food, said to the Echo: 'Alexa, what's the longest place name in Europe?' Llio Angharad asked the Echo to pronounce all 58 letters of the town's name. It replied correctly, noting that the town near Anglesey in north Wales had the'longest town name anywhere'. However, the pronunciation was described as'diabolical' by a Welsh speaker on Twitter. The place name is translated, roughly, into English as: St Mary's Church in the Hollow of the White Hazel Near to the Rapid Whirlpool of Llantysilio of the Red Cave.

How would you feel about getting therapy from a robot? Emotionally intelligent machines may not be as far away as it seems. Over the last few decades, artificial intelligence (AI) have got increasingly good at reading emotional reactions in humans. If AI cannot experience emotions themselves, can they ever truly understand us? And, if not, is there a risk that we ascribe robots properties they don't have? The latest generation of AI's have come about thanks to an increase in data available for computers to learn from, as well as their improved processing power.

Just because one Goldman Sachs MD quit banking for an elusive residency at Google Brain, don't assume you need to leave finance to pursue your passion for machine learning. As artificial intelligence (AI) comes of age, there are a growing number of firms putting self-teaching computers to work in financial services. Better still, most of them are hiring. These are the top companies in the finance world for machine learning right now, along with who they like to hire and the vacancies they have open. If you're interested in machine learning, you may want to apply soon – universities globally are currently training-up thousands of machine learning specialists, including several savvy former traders who saw this trend coming.

Our work focused on how, in the coming age where big data and machine learning algorithms enable you to learn and infer stuff about individuals that are profoundly invasive, marketers – and companies in general – will need to openly explore where their ethical boundaries lay. Before we get into it, I have a confession: AI ethics makes my brain hurt. The issues and questions are that big. Never mind corporate behavior; people, governments, policies and global geopolitics will all evolve differently depending on how we answer those questions. My brain is hurting right now. But if you're a marketer planning to use AI, you're going to hurt a lot more than your brain if you don't start examining the ethical questions.

Matthew Peterson is a pretty inspirational guy. As a dyslexic child he found math class difficult, so as an adult he resolved to totally change the way math is taught. After completing his studies in biology, electrical engineering, and Chinese language and literature at the University of California, Irvine, Peterson co-founded the nonprofit MIND Research Institute and set about developing "Spatial Temporal (ST) Math," a computer game-based method of teaching that doesn't rely on language as a medium. Instead it uses spatial-temporal reasoning--the ability to move stuff around in your mind and work out how it fits together. Proponents point to recent findings in neuroscience and education research--showing that early music training can enhance spatial-temporal reasoning, for example--as justification for this shift.

You may never have heard of diabetic retinopathy, but this nasty condition is the fastest-growing cause of blindness in the world. It poses a risk to the 415 million people with diabetes--nearly 5 percent of the world's population. The condition occurs when chronically high blood sugar damages the tiny vessels that provide blood to the retina. People who suffer from diabetic retinopathy can begin to experience distorted vision and ultimately go blind. And here's the even deeper tragedy: Diabetic retinopathy can be prevented; it just needs to be detected early. With so many people at risk of this condition, the world simply doesn't have enough ophthalmologists available to diagnose them, especially in developing countries.

As we go into 2017 the incipient'technologisation' or'IT-isation', if you'll excuse the terms, of our lives is gathering pace and becoming much plainer to see. AI and deep learning are worth calling out for particular attention. In research consultancy Gartner's'Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2007' survey,[4] Gartner Vice-President and Fellow David Cearley said "over the next 10 years, virtually every app, application and service will incorporate some level of AI. This will form a long-term trend that will continually evolve and expand the application of AI and machine learning for apps and services." Deep learning, a machine learning technique, is emerging as AI's'killer app' enabler.

As you've probably heard, Masayoshi Son, the cunning founder of SoftBank, announced last fall he was raising a $100 billion Vision Fund to back a broad set of transformative companies in artificial intelligence, robotics and other sectors. In Silicon Valley, the news is still resonating. Venture capitalists invested only $79 billion into startups in all of 2015 and were on track to do about the same in 2016. So Son is bringing a bazooka to a gun fight, and the effects will likely be felt here over the next few years. Now we're starting to learn a little bit more about Son's backers in this effort, thanks largely to some of my colleagues.

From a nation defined by cricket, steam engines and horses to a celebrity-obsessed, football-mad country, Britain has undergone huge cultural changes between 1800 and 1950. The history of the country is well-documented in books, but a new analysis has used a different source, newspapers, to pinpoint exactly when these shifts in culture took place. A group of computer scientists have developed artificial intelligence software to analyse articles from 120 British newspapers between 1800 and 1950, and revealed key turning points in our culture. In 2011, a huge analysis of five million books taken from over 200 years provided the first clues to what insights can be gained from analysing words on such a huge scale. But the project was criticised for only counting words, and ignored the context they were based in.

UK ISPs will begin sending out emails to subscribers later this month, warning them of movie, TV and music piracy identified on their connection and pointing them to legal content sources. Providers confirmed to ISPreview the voluntary programme will kick off later this month, with Virgin Media offering more details on how it'll work. If the ISP can link the IP address with a subscriber account, it'll send an email expected to contain an itemisation of the media in question, as well as links to bona fide content sources and other educational, anti-piracy resources. Torrents are the main target here, since it's easy to identify IP addresses due to the peer-to-peer nature of the network (as long as there's no VPN at play). Tracking people that turn to other sources of illegal media, such as direct download sites, is more complex.